“Highly Prized…” (Part 2)

Welcome Back!

Step 4

Now on to painting a background. I decided that I wanted to paint a rainbow gradation of color over the entire box. And, because that is much easier to accomplish if the lid is on the bottom of the box and painted together, I had to trim all the edges. If you were going to paint the lid and bottom all one color or completely different, then I would leave all the trimming to the very end. In my case this had to be done now.

On the lid, I simply and carefully ran an exacto-blade all around the edge to remove the excess.

On the bottom, because it was taped off, I cut all along the edge of where the tape was attached at the edge of the box lip.

Once the cut was made all around the perimeter, I carefully pulled the tape and excess paper away from the box edge. I then cleaned up both edges to be sure that they would fit together snugly.

All ready for paint. Essentially what you have is a primed “canvas”, ready for whatever treatment you would usually do in an art journal. Paint, collage, transfers, stamping, etc. Anything goes!

Step 5

Now for some color. Because I am thinking about the theme, “Highly Prized”, I think treasures, which leads me to rainbows. A wonderful excuse to use every color of the rainbow – naturally! So, I’ve laid out all my colors with a bit of glazing medium to help with the blending and I start at one corner and then progress across the whole box changing colors as I go.

The first layer completed. I often will repeat this process with another 1 or 2 layers until I’m happy with the blending. Because I am using transparent acrylics, this also adds a bit of depth and richness

I stopped at this point to open up the box and clean up any paint that might have seeped in around the edges of the opening. Then, once tidied up again, for further depth, I decided to brayer on a deep purple to pick up some of the texture.

Then I added a layer of white with a cheap stiff dry brush. This picked up the texture even more.

The white was a bit bright, so I toned it down with a very thin glaze tinted with purple. This just kept the highlights from being too over-powering. The finished background ready for text and images:

Glad you enjoyed it, Annemarie. I know what you mean about saving stuff. Since we just moved, I got rid of most everything. The lesson for me was to save only those things that I could put into use fairly soon. Thus, this project. I wanted to “use up” things from Christmas. In my new (smaller) studio. Storage is not as plentiful.